The New SEO Dashboard and How to Best Monitor Your Site & Competitors

Fortunately, we are all different. This means that different users require different necessities, and therefore, different dashboards and displays. After being closely in touch with our clients, we realized that “one-size-fits-all” dashboards are quite difficult to read and use. As nothing brings us as much joy as a happy customer with healthy search engine rankings, we started working on a new dashboard, based on the idea that it should be fully customizable to fit our clients needs. After long working hours and many cups of coffee, we proudly present you the new SEO Dashboard from cognitiveSEO, (probably) the most tailored to your needs and user-friendly interface you’ll get in touch with.

We know how important metrics are for you as your current or future strategies rely on them. At the same time, we know that as important as the metrics might be, the ease with which you access and visualize the data is as important. Our new dashboard offers not only transparency and control over the data associated with your account but also a great way to visualize your marketing efforts. As you put a lot of work in making your site rank well and maintaining a good looking link profile, we think that you should have a great visual output as well. And what is even greater, is that you can share your dashboard with your colleagues, your partners, your clients or anyone you want. That’s right! You just customize your dashboard with all the info you want ( rankings, improved keywords, social media shares, unnatural/natural links , historical charts etc.) and share it to whom it may concern in a very comprehensible and transparent way.

The New SEO Dashboard

What better way to see what it is all about than taking a quick look at the new cognitive SEO dashboard example above. We mention that the dashboard above is just a read-only version.

As we take a look at the image above, we see a range of widgets, all providing different but valuable information about your site, or your competitors. You basically have one page to rule them all, as you can put here all your cognitiveSEO data in one easy to read page. Pretty awesome, right?

All the widgets that you see above are added for explanatory purposes only. You can customize your dashboard just the way you want, whether you want to see just 3 widgets or 30, whether you want to see data coming from your site or from your competitor’s or whether you want focus on a specific component of your link audit (links naturalness, ranking, social media, etc.)

We know that priorities change, reorganizations can occur anytime or you business sometimes might have a different focus. This is why we’ve decided to put the power of success in your hands through our brand new dashboard. What we tried to do was to give you the opportunity of defining your own dashboards needs, customized to the exact specifications you want for your daily project routine.

Before going into a deeper analysis, let me list just some of the advantages of using our shiny new dashboard:

Helps you save time and resources – the new version of the dashboard reduces the amount of time you needed to generate reports, collate and compare them. The new dashboard will display all your important information at a single glance.

Helps you make business decisions based on real time information – the dashboard is displaying information based on the 30minutes, 1 or 2 hours reload time, depending on your choice.

Gives real time insight to you, your team and clients – as it can be shared with anyone you want or presented at several discussions or meetings.

Helps you react quicker – if you are to experience (we hope you won’t) some massive drop in rankings or the number of the unnatural links increase suddenly, just by taking a peek on the dashboard you will be able to react accordingly. Also, if you don’t happen to be around but you shared your dashboard with your colleagues, they can be the one who pull an alarm and start reacting even if the main user of the account is not present at the moment.

Helps you to stay focus and track the essential data for your business – all data is important and some valuable conclusions and directions can be extracted from all metrics but depending on your strategy, you might want to focus on some specific ones.

Having sites with big data might make the inBound link analysis keep you waiting a few seconds before generating the info and the charts. Yet, the dashboard is loading instantly and, what is even greater, it refreshes every 30 minutes, 1 or 2 hours, depending on how you set the widgets. So you have an active view on your current marketing activities.

We are going to give a detailed overview of all the types of widgets that you can add to your dashboard a bit later. For the moment, let me just tell you that you can place here valuable information coming from the inbound link analysis, rank tracking or social visibility modules. Basically, any information or analysis that you can find in the tool can be “resumed” and easily presented through a widget, be it metrics, data charts, keywords or lists.

Ultra Fast SEO Metrics Visibility

To understand how you can best take advantage of your new dashboard, let’s review some of the main metrics that you can monitor just at a glance.

New/Lost links

It has never been easier to check out the new/lost links ratio of any site you have in your analysis. Our “New and Lost Links” widget allows you to see in an instant how many new links a site is acquiring compared to the number of links that are lost, in an instant. The historical chart widget helps you have an overview of the new/lost links over time and see a clear evolution of your site from this specific point of view. You can easily spot if some major loss or acquiring happened in specific periods of time and closely analyze those situations in order to get the best out of them.

Not only the new/lost link numbers are important but also knowing who is linking to a certain website, what type of backlinks that site gets or what type of site those links are coming from. Having this information about your site or your competitors can keep you ahead of the competition, as you can gain valuable information. Visualizing the lost links helps you to maintain a healthy link profile. Checking these links can help you to figure out whether they were redirected, deleted or if there is another reason you should check out.

Unnatural Links

In the highly competitive SEO and marketing world today, unnatural links are something that everybody talks about. Webmasters struggle to find tools that could help them identify the rotten apples in their garden while Google sharpens its weapons to catch “the enemy”. Keeping an eye wide open on your natural link profile is a must and the unnatural links widget is of great help in this direction. You can stay alert 24/7 as you can see the link counts on unnatural , suspect or OK links for your site or your competitor’s. Furthermore, you can see the historical evolution of the links and the changes that occurred recently in the link profile. If you want to take a peek at the new unnatural links, to analyze where are they coming from, what kind of links they are and so on, you can also do that as the “New Unnatural Links” widget allows you to do exactly that. We highly recommend you to use these features, as the saying goes:

One Unnatural Widget a Day, Keeps The Google Penalty Away!

Declined Rankings

At the end of the day, what interest us most are the rankings. Now you don’t have to run the whole analysis to see if your keywords improved or declined or on what position are they standing. The Rank Tracking widgets tell you your exact situation in an instant. You can choose to use widgets that will tell you the number of improved or declined keywords but you can also see the exact list with these keywords, followed by the position they are standing on. Also, if you have an overview of the historical ranking evolution on the main search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) of a certain site, you can do that by adding the “Ranking Trend” widget to your dashboard. Shortly, all these widgets can give you valuable insights about how you’re standing at the current time, how rankings changed in the past weeks and also helps you see what was your ranking trend in the past months.

Shared Pages

With the growing importance of social media in the Internet Marketing Mix, it is important to know how your social strategy stands against your competitor’s social strategies. To get access to this information you need to analyze the “shareability” of your competitors content. The social media widgets give you a quick and in-depth insight into the social media marketing techniques that are used by any site. You can choose to see the social media share distribution for the main social channels or you can choose to monitor only a specific channel that you are interested in. In addition, a historical overview of the pages might really come in hand when trying to understand the evolution of your own site or your competitor’s site social strategy.

Easily Share Your Dashboard with Clients or Team Members + White-Label

We are very excited to announce that now you can share your dashboard with whomever you want. You still have the possibility to generate reports and present them to your team or clients but we think that sharing your dashboard is even a better solution to show your marketing efforts or present a link audit in a transparent and intelligible way. Sharing a dashboard will provide the others with the campaign name, all the widgets and data fields that are populated with information from your cognitiveSEO account. You can use the dashboard in your presentation, in your meetings with the client or you can even project it on the screens of your office.
Sharing the information inside and outside the organization helps you to provide detailed and accurate performance reporting and also can dispel any doubt or suspicion, maintaining just one version of the truth.
Another great asset of the dashboard’s shareability is that any person who has access to the dashboard can identify important changes in the link profile and react promptly even if the user of the cognitiveSEO account is not around. And it can also be white-labeled.

Your Site Compared to Your Competitors

There is much wisdom in the saying “one should keep his friends close and his enemies closer”. In the ever changing SEO context, companies should track their competition more than ever. No matter what type of business you have, there is always going to be competition. Even if you’re a leader in your domain or you’re just a start-up, you should always keep a close eye on the competitors.

In the online world, some may argue that this task is easier since everything is just a click away. We all know that in the real life, things are not really like that. Yet, we tried to make this task as simple and effortless as possible. On your dashboard, you can add near the widgets with your own site, some with your competitor’s in order to have a better overview of how you and your competition stand on the market.

Here are some of the great possibilities you can take advantage of, thanks to our newly designed dashboard:

Quickly see the opportunities you have in the market you compete

Understand your competitors evolution

Monitor your competitors continuously

Dissect your competitors’ social media strategy

Figure out your competitors’ SEO strategy

+37 Amazing SEO Widgets come to the Rescue

All widgets are very flexible to work with. You can move or resize the widget to any custom size just by clicking on the bottom-right corner of the widget window and dragging it to the desired dimension. You can also apply a certain bullet tag. There are several colors from which you can choose so later on you can filter them out with these tags.
Yet, we find it a little unfair to keep on talking about our brand new widgets without presenting them, so here they are,the magic 38 SEO widgets that might bring added value to your business, listed in the order they appear on the dashboard.

Inbound Link Analysis.

Numbers

Referring Domains – This widget presents the total number of analyzed referring domains for the site. A lot of SEO professionals are impressed, and guided, by the total raw link counts of a site.
The number of links a site has is indeed important but more important is the number of referring domains.

Links Analyzed – Here you will find information about the total number of analyzed links for the site.You might notice a discrepancy between these two numbers. That is because we extract only the newest and most important links (up to 20 per referring domain). The rest of the links are side-wide links that distort the analysis and rarely have any value from an SEO point of view.

New/Lost Links – You can see at just a glance the total number of new/lost links for the site starting from a selected date. The New/Lost Links widget is an important signal on what is happening to you and your competitors right now and can give you ideas for new SEO directions and can reveal new opportunities.

Live/Lost Links - Here you will find information about the total number of Live and Lost links for a specific site. It’s true that live links are the one that should concern you most but valuable information can also be pulled out from the number of lost links. You should always keep an eye on the live/lost link ratio and whenever you plan a new direction or strategy, you should take these numbers into consideration as well.

NoFollow/DoFollow Links – You will find information about the total number of NoFollow/DoFollow links for the site starting from a selected date. Regardless of the rumors you hear, both DoFollow and NoFollow links are a natural part of the web that you need to be aware of. DoFollow links may do more for SEO, but both deserve a place in your online marketing strategy and both need to be tracked.

Unnatural Links - This widget we’ll let you know in an instant the total number of Unnatural, Suspicious and OK links for the site starting from a selected date. With all the Google algorithms going on, this might be one of the most helpful widgets in a webmaster’s attempt to stay away from penalties and maintain a healthy link profile.

Charts

Link Velocity – it’s highly important to be taken into account and represents the growth trend of a site’s link profile. Link Velocity trends can also be natural or unnatural. An unnatural link velocity will have various spikes on various time frames without generating a natural looking trend. This widget will let you know the Historical Link Velocity for the site starting from a selected date.

Daily New/Lost Links – You can easily spot the Historical Daily New/Lost Links Evolution starting from a selected date. The historical chart widget helps you have an overview of the new/lost links over the time and see a clear evolution of your site from this specific point of view. You can easily spot if some major loss or acquiring happened in specific periods of time and closely analyze those situations in order to get the best out of them.

Live/Lost Links History – The Historical List/Lost Links Evolution starting from a selected date. Our live links and lost links widget allow you to see in an instant how many live links a site has compared to the number of links that once existed and ceased to exist anymore. Without having a list of freshly crawled data you cannot have an accurate analysis of your link profile.

Unnatural Links History – You are presented with the Historical Unnatural Links Evolution starting from a selected date. Knowing the numbers of unnatural/ok/suspect links is important but being aware of their evolution in time can get you a lot of benefits.

Text/Image/Redirect History – Here you can see the Historical Text/Image/Redirect Links Evolution starting from a selected date. It’s highly important to know the origin of your links and the way they evolved in time.

NoFollow/DoFollow Links History – This widget will help you to see the Historical NoFollow/DoFollow Links Evolution starting from a selected date. Being aware of this evolution is important as knowing the past can help you make the best choices in the present.

Website Category History – The Historical Website Category Links Evolution starting from a selected date will let you know the categories in which your links fit. These categories can vary from topical categories such as Food to Business, Culture, Education, Games, Gambling, etc.

Link Positioning History – The Historical Link Positioning Links Evolution gives you information about the position of the link during time, starting from a selected date. The position might be in a group of links, on banners, on blog comments, short paragraph of texts, etc.

Lists

New Links – Here you can find the widget presenting The List of New Links for the site starting from a selected date. Not only the new link number is important but also knowing who is linking to a certain website, what type of backlinks that site gets or what type of site those links are coming from.

Lost Links – Here you can find The List of Lost Links for the site starting from a selected date. Visualizing the lost links helps you to maintain a healthy link profile.

New Unnatural Links – You should always stay alert and check The List of New Unnatural Links for the site starting from a selected date. This widget might get you out of a lot of trouble by helping you prevent a Google penalty.

New Suspect Links – The List of New Suspect Links for the site starting from a selected date gives you an insight about the links you should take a look at and figure out the reason they are considered to be suspect.

New OK Links – The List of New OK Links for the site starting from a selected date offers you information about the links your site has that comply with the search engines guidelines and are considered to be organic.

Rank Tracking

Numbers

Improved Keywords – The total number of keywords that have an improved ranking starting from a selected date. An important metric that gives you an overall idea if your keywords are improving.

Declined Keywords – The total number of keywords that have a declined ranking starting from a selected date. You can check to see how many keywords are declining and detect possible problems.

Unchanged Keywords – The total number of keywords that don’t have an improved or declined ranking starting from a selected date. If there are lots of keywords unchanged for a long period of time it’s a sign of stability.

Charts

Ranking Trend – The Historical Ranking Trend for the site starting from a selected date. This widget displays the trend for all keywords monitored for the desired site. It’s important to watch over the ranking trends of your website and the ones of your competitors to detect problems or possible successful strategies.

Lists

Improved Keywords List – The List of Improved Keywords for the site starting from a selected date. This widget displays a list of keywords which have improved their ranking since the previous check. For example, if a keyword has the position 10 and in the third column it writes 3, it means that it improved 3 positions.

Declined Keywords List – The List of Declined Keywords for the site starting from a selected date. It displays a list of keywords which have declined their ranking since the previous check. For example, if a keyword has the position 10 and in the third column it writes 3, it means that it declined 3 positions.

Unchanged Keywords List – The List of Unchanged Keywords for the site starting from a selected date. It also displays their current position.

Social Visibility

Numbers

Twitter Shares – The total number of Twitter shares for a site.

Facebook Shares – The total number of Facebook shares for a site.

Google Plus Shares – The total number of Google Plus shares for a site.

Total Shares – The total number of shares for a site. This shows you how your site is performing overall on social platforms.

Pages with Share Increase – The number of pages from a site that have a Share Increase or Decrease starting from a selected date. This gives you the opportunity to see how many pages are performing well on social platforms. The number from the right side represents the total number of webpages from your website.

New Shared Pages – The number of Newly Shared pages from a site starting from a selected date. On the right side you have the total number of pages you have on the website.

Charts

Social Media Shares History – The Historical Evolution of the Social Shares for a site starting from a selected date. The chart contains data about the evolution of your website’s total shares on Google, Facebook, Twitter and also the total shares.

Social Media Share Distribution – The Social Shares Distribution across all the tracked social providers for a site. This is a visual overview of the breakdown on social shares.

Lists

Pages with Share Increase List – The List of Pages from a site that have a Share Increase or Decrease starting from a selected date. You can identify which pages have performance spikes in order to identify which type of content proves to be interesting over time.

New Shared Pages List – The List of Newly Shared pages from a site starting from a selected date. Useful to check how your newest website pages are performing on social platforms.

Conclusion

We are very proud with our newly designed dashboard and we really think that this will bring added value to our client’s work. Just like any other big change, the use of the new dashboard might seem a bit challenging. Yet, with a little patience we are sure that everything will work out just fine. All things are difficult before they become easy. And to make it even easier here is the full documentation on the new dashboard.

At cognitiveSEO, our constant efforts are heading towards our clients and the people who, someway or another, get in touch with our tool. This is why, we would be more than happy if you could tell us what other features you would like to see from our SEO dashboard Software. You fancy the idea of a SEO Dashboard with your Google Analytics account integration? Or maybe with other widgets? Share your thoughts and we might just implement them

He is the proud Founder & Chief Architect of cognitiveSEO, an SEO Toolset focused on in-depth analysis of
ranking signals. With over 8 years experience in affiliate marketing and search engine optimization and 12
years in programming and web development, he has gone from Web Developer to Super Affiliate for large
international networks. With a strong focus on everything that is Search Engine related, he developed
strategies to stand-out search engine updates. His passion for search engine marketing led him to create
his own SEO Toolset, trying to solve the issues that he is facing in the search engine optimization field.